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Down the Academy’s main road you went, passing a pair of open-bed military trucks delivering black-uniformed riders. Crews, likely newly trained for those who didn’t have crew retinue ready. With no maneuvers scheduled for today, they must just be getting settled in. They’d be going to a barracks separate from the rest of the academy, assigned haphazardly upon any officers receiving commission and assignment.
At some point you’d have to think on picking people out, or maybe, you’d just get the guys over from the Hogs. Mittelsosalia’s new laws concerning mercenary gangs were finally making Hell’s old company move out. Whoever wasn’t packing up was joining up with the new Republic’s army. They hadn’t decided where to move the headquarters yet, but you’d been told you’d be getting a letter about it when it happened. Just in case, after all the times you’d refused before, you’d pick <span class="mu-i">now</span> to reconsider.
As you looked back curiously over the tankers, you saw Magnus coming down the road, and you smiled to yourself. Good. He was motivated. Time to test him, then- and yourself. A meeting of four roads met the main road from the Academy to the city of Strosstadt, and you leaned into a turn to take the rightmost path, a narrow and twisting road into the gentle sloping hills of the capital’s outskirts.
You didn’t know these roads as well as you might have liked, but that made this an adventure. Who knew where the two of you might end up? Wherever it was, out here, it was bound to be pretty. It was just far away enough from the capital’s smog for the air to smell fresh and clean, the wind sang as it rode over top and in between the hills, carefully maintained woods kept like gardens by the noble estates out this way. No factories, no traffic, just endless wandering until you got sick of it. When you stopped, it could even be at one of the little villages or towns that dotted the region, idyllic rural retreats away from the pounding of the industrial heart that were a mix of old sleepy settlements and new villages younger than you were, founded entirely either for stewardship of an image. No poor scrapings were these- any seeking a change in prosperity swarmed into the nearby city instead.
The beauty extended to the roads themselves. Not dirt, they had been metalled and manicured, even if they remained thin. Not that such was a problem for motorcycles of course.
Suddenly, you heard a throttle behind you and Edelschwert sped past you on the inside curve of the road- the opposite side of proper traffic. Not so goody two shoes when he was on a machine, huh? Did he want to make this a race?
…Well, good. If he’d hung out behind any longer then you’d have to call him out for staring at your ass. Just to make him squirm.
